[Excerpt from the proposal for my current book project Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Early Modern Philosophy in Global Context, 1580-1750]
The proposed book is a book about philosophy as a global phenomenon,
but it is not a comparative study of
philosophical traditions. One great disadvantage of comparative study,
plotting, for example, medieval Latin logicians against the Sanskrit authors of
the Navya-Nyāya tradition, is
that it takes these to be closed systems of thought, each generated out of a
distinct civilizational character. But this misses the fact that, to a great
extent, philosophical traditions, like other aspects of culture (tool use,
agriculture), emerge through diffusion. Europe, moreover, is neither the
initial source of the diffusion, nor, when it comes to be a significant node in
the process of diffusion, is Europe's significance defined principally by
internal developments.
Modern European philosophy has often worked very hard to conceal its
non-European sources: thus Leibniz, for example, blames the Arabs for
distorting the legacy of the Greeks, rather than expressing gratefulness for
their preservation of the Greek tradition. And the Greek tradition itself is retroactively made European, rather than being placed
in continuity with other Eastern Mediterranean and Indo-European traditions
with which it was in contact and out of which it grew (see Burkert 2004 for a
judicious treatment of the Greek debt to Eastern traditions). Professionally
trained historians have long recognized that Europe was never Europe alone, but
was always defined by its exchanges and encounters with the world beyond its
borders. Yet historians of philosophy remain, whether they recognize it or not,
committed to a view of European philosophy that is in its essence Hegelian,
according to which Europe is not just one node in a global system, but is
instead the very center and culmination of world history. This center may for them be compared
with (implicitly or explicitly inferior) systems of thought, but may not be
seen as existing in continuity with, and emerging as a result of exchange with,
these other systems.
Comparative study, whether of crop-rotation systems or of
metaphysical traditions, is not uninformative, but in philosophy comparative
study has entirely dominated previous attempts to comprehend philosophy as a
global phenomenon. The proposed book will contribute to the correction of this
imbalance, by revealing the impact of the early modern encounter with the
extra-European world on European philosophy. The focus will be not on
encounters with other systems of thought that might be candidates for the name
'philosophy', but rather, principally, with nature itself, and with the systems
of natural knowledge of cultures that would later be called 'primitive', but
that were generally described in the early modern period as 'savage' or
'pagan'. This encounter, I will show, like the Jesuit encounter with Chinese
learning, or the 18th-century encounter with the Sanskrit tradition, had a
significant impact on the self-understanding of European philosophy in the
modern period, on the way it conceptualized problems, and on the answers it
produced to solve them.
Centers of Commerce, Centers of
Philosophy. One does not have to be a committed
materialist in order to acknowledge the close connection between the history of
philosophy on the one hand and the history of commerce on the other. Indeed,
one of history's more prominent idealist philosophers, G. W. Leibniz, observed
of the exchanges between China and Europe that the commerce of goods is always
accompanied by a 'commerce of light'.
In fact, it is striking the extent to which the history of the geography
of philosophy --by which we may understand the motion of the centers of
philosophical activity from one region to another-- parallels the motion of
centers of trade from one region to another. Thus, for example, over the course of the 16th century, the
center of much natural-philosophical inquiry shifts from northern Italy to the
Low Countries, just as many other spheres of cultural activity do.
That philosophy has its own geography, with its own centers and
peripheries, is one that philosophers ordinarily do not wish to acknowledge,
since philosophical inquiry is supposed to be inquiry into questions that are
always and everywhere the same, and moreover, philosophical inquiry, not
requiring lab equipment or fieldwork, should be able to be pursued with a very
low budget. Yet the fact remains that, still today, one cannot become a
prominent philosopher without ever leaving one's home if one happens to be born
in the global peripheries. Indeed, for reasons we will not pursue here, but
which are surely not entirely coincidental, the most impactful philosophy
appears to be produced in closest proximity to the centers of global
finance. This was at least as much
the case in the early modern period as it is today.
Yet centers of finance, in turn, are but the headquarters of vast
and --since the beginning of the modern period-- global enterprises. Once we
acknowledge that centers of philosophy move along with centers of commerce, we
might next inquire whether the former, too, have a field from which data come
back and are in turn processed and speculated upon. In this book, I will not
argue that this is a general or unchanging feature of the history of
philosophy, but I will argue that it characterizes early modern natural
philosophy very well. The centers
of philosophical activity in England, Holland, and France were at the same time
the centers of global imperial and commercial projects, and the philosophy
itself reflected this: it was fundamentally characterized by the global
activity of the societies in which it was carried out.
The field of encounters that will be of most interest in this book
are those that take place beyond the boundaries of the other great empires of
the early modern world.
Consideration of the encounter with the Chinese and Islamic worlds (and
also to some extent the Indian world, though, apart from Bernier and a few
other sources, it was not until the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th
centuries that the richness of the 'Brahminical' tradition came to be noticed
in Europe), too easily lends itself to comparative study of the history of
philosophy, which the proposed work seeks emphatically to avoid. We do not want
to measure up different systems of natural philosophy, European and
non-European, and see how they fare relative to one another, but rather to
study European philosophy in its global context. For this, the encounter with 'Lapps', 'Cafres', and
'Cannibals' is generally as revealing as that with the Chinese and the Turks. To put this point metaphorically: if
Leibniz hoped for a 'commerce of light' between Europe and China (see Perkins
2005), I wish here to look at that activity that precedes commerce, namely,
resource extraction, and to show that just as there is a commerce of light that
moves alongside the commerce of goods, there is also an 'extraction of
light'. This occurs mostly in
encounters with people who have no manufactured wares to trade, but do have
what we will be calling here 'native knowledge': environmentally conditioned
know-how, presumed to be ungrounded by theory. Not coincidentally, this sort of encounter happens in those
parts of the world in which European expansion was focused not on establishing
delicate relations with trading partners, but rather on moving directly to
resource extraction.
The proposed book is by no means a work of social and economic
history, and my aim is not to study the sociology of philosophy (see Collins
1998), but rather only the way in which this process influenced the content of
natural philosophy in the period.
It will be useful, however, to provide a brief survey in this
introduction, based on the work of Braudel (1979), Wallerstein (1974, 1980),
and others, of the emergence of European centers of cultural activity from the
Renaissance and into the modern period, particularly with an eye to the way in
which the emergence of universities and scientific societies paralleled the
emergence of other varieties of cultural activity, what Francis Bacon
identifies in the New Atlantis as
"letters, arts, and civility," in the course of explaining how the
Native Americans came to lack these basic markers by which centers are
distinguished from peripheries. The overall aim of this book is to show how
early modern globalization impacted that branch of letters, arts, and civility
that we call 'philosophy'. A part
of this story will include the encounter with people, both real and, as in
Bacon's case, imagined, but another perhaps more fundamental part will concern
the encounter with new features of nature, features that only become salient
when natural science and natural philosophy come to have, for the first time,
the whole world open to them for study.
